What Happens When Ozempic Takes Over Your Town

When Marie Ellis first heard about Ozempic a couple of years ago, she didn’t think it sounded right for her. She was in her mid-40s, weighed 265 pounds and had a family history of liver disease, but she thought weight-loss shots were just for movie stars or people misbehaving on reality shows. “I was like, ‘Is this for real?’” she says, sitting in the office of her tax preparation firm in Bowling Green, Kentucky. “Or is this for people in Hollywood?”

But after trying every faddish diet plan in the book, Ellis figured she had nothing to lose when, about a year and a half ago, her doctor wrote her a prescription for Mounjaro, an Ozempic competitor. She was soon around 80 pounds lighter, and that wasn’t the only thing about her that changed. She’d been a smoker since her late teens. Now, Ellis discovered, she no longer craved cigarettes.